An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Read online

  An Age Without a Name

  Book Five of “The Cause”

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2017 by Randall Allen Farmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form. This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  An Age Without a Name

  Book Five of “The Cause”

  “Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife,

  Throughout the sensual world proclaim,

  One crowded hour of glorious life

  Is worth an age without a name.” -- Sir Walter Scott

  Prolog

  (3/7/73, before the retaking of Chicago)

  Dolores Sokolnik

  “Bruja Martinez, regarding the Hunter pleasure palace we found in Denver. Could it have been set up by their Shamans?” Del said, with caution. She glanced around the church basement reading room again. The faces around her remained grim.

  The Las Cruces Baptist church had been their home for the last three days. A dry, barren place, for a dry, poor congregation. The little room smelled of chalk, for reasons Del didn’t understand, and the only sign of warmth was the small library of Bible commentaries on a worn bookcase. “By their captive Crows?”

  Bruja Martinez thought for a moment. She represented the Familia, the people of the Brujas and Duende. Their group of Major Transforms controlled the Transforms in the Chihuahuan desert area of northern Mexico and south, through the mountains, to the Guadalajara area. As well as some of the dryland Transforms of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. They were Arm Amy Haggerty’s new allies, and both sides remained cautious with each other, as they were still learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses. “I don’t believe so. I metasensed one of their captive Shamans. It was a talent-less thing, crippled by the same demonic possession as the Hunter-beasts.” That is, ‘the Law’, the juice construct imprinted in all the Hunters. “If their other Shamans are like that, the Denver pleasure palace would have been far beyond them.”

  Amy’s group had only this morning received word from Chicago of the latest battle between the Hunters and the followers of the Cause. In it, the Hunters attacked the Transform refugee encampment outside of Chicago, and, much to everyone’s surprise, lost. The Chicago defenders were half-heartedly chasing the remains of General Enkidu’s army and preparing an attempt to retake Chicago. They expected the city to be minimally defended, and wanted to grab the opportunity to free the local captive Focuses. The news lifted everyone’s spirits except Amy’s.

  Amy distrusted the good news. Del, after much thought, agreed with the older Arm. She wasn’t sure why, but her subconscious refused to consider the Chicago fight as a victory for the good guys, despite the Hunters’ retreat.

  Del turned to Amy. “Ma’am, my insight is that the Crow faction we know of as the Judges is actively helping the Hunters.” The pleasure palace was Crow technology, and if it was beyond the capabilities of the Hunter’s own Crows, then some other Crows must have been responsible.

  Last November, one of the Judges, going by the name La Brea, had contacted Dr. Zielinski and passed him information about first Focus Fingleman. They wanted an alliance with Arm Keaton. At least, that’s what they said. They were a secretive crew, and clearly playing their own game. “I think the Judges are doing the high-end Crow support for the Hunters, and doing so without being marked by the Law. It’s this Guru-level Crow support that’s allowing the Hunters to increase their numbers so quickly and effectively, though I don’t know the means they’re using. Arm Keaton suspected Wandering Shade hadn’t been working alone, and in her notes, she hypothesized Wandering Shade once led a Crow faction, and needed them in order to be able to do what he did. I believe the Judges are this faction.”

  Amy met Del’s eyes and studied her, using capabilities Del didn’t yet understand. A large group of Transforms sat around the meeting table in the borrowed church basement. Focus Hargrove, Sinclair and Midgard, Page Stidman the former Hunter, Duke Hoskins, Warden Jane, Bruja Martinez, and Bruja Torres and her partner, Duende Poder. A room filled with grim faces.

  Del appreciated her brand new tag from Amy Haggerty, and the protection it offered. She lived a dangerous life these days as part of the fight against the Hunter Empire, an enemy even Amy’s large army wouldn’t be able to defeat without a large number of reinforcements. Del noticed a hardness to her boss recently, a new edge. Haggerty was one of the old Arms; Keaton had never liked her, and yet Haggerty survived her training despite the dislike. Haggerty pushed the Cause and brought the revolution, likely the most consequential individual action any Major Transform had ever accomplished since Focus Seiurs figured out how to move juice from female to male Transforms. Haggerty had taken on the FBI all by herself, fought them to a standstill, and converted a not inconsiderable number of them to her service. Her reputation, as the best pure fighter among the Arms, was self-evident to Del.

  For shelter from the coming storm, Del could do worse than Amy Haggerty. She drew comfort from the tag. The Haggerty tag was a hot thing, as alive with energy as Haggerty herself, and sometimes it seemed to burn as it drove Del beyond her limits. Today, though, that heat comforted, a bonfire on a cold night.

  A great many cold nights would soon come, Del predicted. Chicago was, somehow, a loss, and that meant more hard battles lay ahead. She would need to develop her own edge. Haggerty didn’t tolerate mistakes in general, and would be less tolerant now.

  At least Del contributed something today, her insight from her now fixed-up quiet pools. At Del’s side sat Bruja Modesty, with a patch over her almost re-grown eye, here to show off the changes in her, and so she and Del could support each other. Except for the eye, and the length of her right arm, she looked both healthy and sane, a long step up from her appearance a month and a half ago.

  For the first half-hour of the meeting, Sinclair and Amy had grilled Bruja Modesty regarding her recent sessions with Bruja Torres. Following their grilling, and an extensive set of questions to the new Bruja, at Del’s request Amy granted Modesty three new triads, in addition to the five Transforms Modesty won for good behavior. They would hit the clinics shortly if the current crisis allowed.

  “Yes,” Amy said. Her face remained intent and hard as she flitted from one person to the next with her eyes. More than one person paled during their turn under her gaze. “I got some information from Zielinski late last year. Sinclair, have you ever heard of a Crow by the name of Athabasca, supposedly a Guru?”

  Sinclair nodded, and frowned. “Yes. Guru Athabasca supports and teaches many of the Crows in the coastal cities of Washington and Oregon. The Crow grapevine refers to them as ‘those jerks’, and no Crow I know of will visit those areas voluntarily. It makes sense to me that those Crows are the Judges.”

  “How about Crow Jester, supposedly a Mentor?” Amy asked.

  “I’ve only heard the name,” Sinclair said. “And only in the last year or so; the first letters mentioning him appeared in my mailbox two weeks after your successful return from the Eskimo Spear quest. To give you a feel for how nebulous this Jester is, I don’t know or have any letter writing contacts that have met him, or have even talked or wrote to someone who’s met him.”

  “We should hunt them down and take them out,” Duke Hoskins said, his voice a deep growl. “If we do that, we can cripple the Hunters’ support. Perhaps we can learn enough from them to do some real damage to the Hunters afterwards.” He turned to Page Stidman. “You ever hear of any Judges, Page?”

  Pa
ge Stidman, in his man form, squirmed. From what Del had seen, the senior Nobles treated the young Nobles (which the former Hunter counted as, despite his age as a Hunter) as roughly as the senior Arms treated the younger Arms. He was well disciplined, though, at least for someone who wasn’t an Arm, and Hoskins’ gaze forgave less than Haggerty’s. “Sir. Yes, I’ve heard rumors of Crows, termed the cloaked ones, who aid the Hunters. I believe I even met one, named La Brea. He dressed as a normal human judge, come to think of it.”

  They hadn’t gotten nearly as much information from Page Stidman as either Amy or Del liked, in part because Hoskins claimed the new Page’s time, and didn’t allow anything proper and Arm-like to be done to the new Noble. Del had a request in with both Amy and the Duke for permission to accept one of the Page’s many combat challenges. She had no doubt she would be able to defeat him, and once defeated and humbled, she might gain enough Major Transform leverage to get him to spill more information.

  Their other problem was ignorance about which questions to ask. Page Stidman gave them the names of the leading Hunters, the Hunters’ forces, in part, and the location of several Hunter strongholds, including the street address of Enkidu’s mountain hide-away in Montana. That was where the Hunter leadership kept Focus Elspeth, and yes, Page Stidman verified that ‘The General’ had set up the place to be a trap specifically for them.

  This La Brea Crow did seem to get around, though, and since no one had mentioned Doctor Zielinski’s encounter with La Brea to Page Stidman, Stidman’s information was a strong confirmation of Del’s theory.

  “I believe it’s time we go to the Pacific northwest,” Hoskins said. He looked first at Amy, who didn’t flinch or react. This decision was his but not his alone, as he claimed ownership of overall strategic questions, part of his agreement with Haggerty. No Arm appreciated anyone ordering her around, and taking orders from a peer was almost impossible, or so Del thought, without a tagged relationship. Yet, those two had slowly, over the years, beat an alliance between them into shape. Literally beat, in this case. With the added spice of post-combat sex. Nearly as good as a tag would have been, proving the Commander’s dicta that there was nothing a tag could do that couldn’t be done in other ways, albeit much more slowly. Del had seen the senior-most Noble follow Amy’s orders without question in several hot situations, enough to grasp how the strange balance between the two of them had been achieved.

  Hoskins then turned to Bruja Torres and Duende Podor. Bruja Torres, an elfin Focus, didn’t react for a moment, weighing her responsibilities before giving a slow nod. Duende Podor, a short hairy mustachioed man with a physique that could only be called ravishingly beautiful, nodded much faster when Duke Hoskins turned to him. As a fellow Chimera, he anticipated combat and wanted hot bloody revenge for the past depredations of the Hunters.

  Del relaxed. This was it, proof that the unstated formal alliance between their disparate and foreign Major Transform groups could work at the strategic level. This was new, and filled with stature for everyone in this room, most especially Amy and the Duke.

  With any luck, this would give them the edge they needed against the Hunters and their backers. Given the numerical advantage the Hunters possessed, they would need it.

  Part One

  The Emperors’ Magician

  “If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them

  by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and

  moreover will become good.” – Confucius

  “You owe it to me, beast”

  Henry Zielinski (3/8/73)

  Tiny arcs of static electricity coursed across the one millimeter of air between Hank’s thumb and index finger. Or so it seemed. Healing energies. Visible through borrowed metasense, he suspected, although his ability to otherwise borrow metasense remained nonexistent. Obscure, too, as only Guru Chevalier had been able to verify the existence of what Hank metasensed. An observation verifying his sanity. He hoped.

  Up before the dawn again, Hank sat in his office. His relatively new ability to heal others, as a Transform, represented power. Something provoking speculation and self-examination. What could he do with such power? What were its limits? Was this something he needed to borrow explicitly from Arm Webberly, or were the chemicals behind this new ability available from any Arm, or perhaps any Major Transform? Might one Transform pass this to another similarly talented Transform?

  From his analysis came a new insight on the nature of power as a Transform, Major and otherwise. For years, he had bought into the second and third generation Focus conclusion that the root of evil in the Transform community had been impunity, the power of their leaders to do whatever they wanted. Now, with a true and tangible Transform ability of his own to utilize and ponder, he found a different conclusion.

  Evil in the Transform community came from the power to stop, arbitrarily, other Transforms from using their abilities. This was more than just a subset of impunity, but a particular evil all in itself, enabled by the blocker’s impunity.

  A bit of juice rattled around in his mind, yanking him out of his distracted cogitation and reminding him of the other early risers in Inferno. The bit of juice in his mind that was his own personal copy of the daily household leadership schedule now showed a newly entered meeting. 9:15, with Arm Webberly, a discussion on the recent events in Chicago.

  He took a deep breath and steadied himself. Nine days ago, Enkidu and the largest Hunter army yet seen had attacked the Chicago Transform community. The Hunters killed, captured or chased all the Transforms out of Chicago, but failed in their attempt to capture Focus Gail Rickenbach, currently referred to as the Director and the current head of The Cause. Nor did they manage to kill or capture many of Gail’s personal entourage of Focuses, Crows and Transforms. Unfortunately, many of those defending her and her entourage against the Hunters, including the first Noble Chimera, Earl Sellers, did die. Two nights ago, the Hunter army again attacked the Cause’s refugee camp south of Chicago, seeking additional slaughter and captives. This time, the Hunters lost, though Hank still didn’t know the details. Yesterday, somehow, and again doing the seemingly impossible, the Director’s much-reduced army retook Chicago. Focus Rickenbach’s people, many of whom Hank personally knew, had been out of telephone contact ever since the night attack on the refugee camp began. His only information came from those who Dreamed, the Major Transforms able to distantly communicate with other Dreamers. In his case, and that of the Inferno household, his information came from Focus Mimi Minton, a powerful Dreamer and one of the two Focuses who now supported Inferno.

  Hank stood, stretched, and left his cramped basement office, not for the meeting, but for breakfast. He ignored his tiny next-door lab and the larger bulk food storage room beyond that, trying not to think too hard about all his shelved researched projects. He missed his old lab in the Littleside complex, and he missed the Commander’s much larger research budget even more.

  The idea of a mental schedule still discommoded him, often prompting him to wonder if he had fallen asleep Rip Van Winkle-like and awakened in the future, a future where he assumed all Transform households would utilize these disquieting tricks. This was his life now, though. He had been a Transform for less than three months. Coping hurt, but he soldiered on anyway. Coping.

  The Inferno household, his home since late January, currently occupied the Oak Valley nursing home in San Jose, California. Oak Valley had been so mismanaged it went bankrupt, allowing Inferno to acquire the property for an astonishingly small amount of money. The previous owners built this place on an extravagant scale, with wide hallways even in parts of the basement (not his parts of the basement, but some parts). He smiled at the clank of weights from the Inferno gym as he walked over to the elevator, which he took to the first floor. Seeing the early morning twilight outside, he exited the building’s south wing for a short morning stroll. Oak Valley contained two residential floors and was irregular in shape, a crazy quilt of small boxy-sh
aped buildings linked by short covered walkways, separated roughly into a south wing and north wing, joined by an ugly box of a building with a two story entry area, a central meeting room complete with an unused bandstand, a kitchen, cafeteria and several small meeting rooms and parlors. Hank walked along the winding path through the ill-maintained courtyard between the two wings, overgrown with weeds and dryland scrub, some poking up through cracks between the concrete.

  He reached the back entrance to the north wing, nodded at the door guard, and turned to the left, toward the kitchen and group dining area. The night cleaning crew had, as usual, failed to clean all the scuffmarks off the linoleum. Despite their six weeks here and despite the year the bankrupt nursing home sat vacant, the place still reeked of antiseptic and urine. More strolling took him to the central building and into the two story lobby. The lobby sported several recent bullet holes in the walls, left unpatched in memory of the dead.

  Through the front lobby windows, he saw Peter Sanders and the grounds maintenance crew already hard at work, toting wheelbarrows of gravel from the gravel pile over to the parking area. Filling in potholes. Behind them sat the thirty foot tall hill that lay to the northwest of the four acre Oak Valley complex, across the street, dotted with a few commercial buildings and blocking the view of most of San Jose proper. A new six hundred acre suburb lay to the east of Oak Valley, about a quarter of the way built out. Oak Valley sat on the south edge of San Jose’s development, and to the south of them sat tall scrub-infested hills that hadn’t changed much since the days of the Conquistadors.

  He followed the scent of bacon to the cafeteria, and spotted Van and Daisy Schuber awake and eating breakfast. After collecting his banana and cold cereal, he sat down and joined them. Daisy, Van’s sister, served as Hank’s ‘lab assistant’, though she worked more often these days with Inferno’s depleted bodyguard crew. Van, the estranged husband of Focus Gail Rickenbach, was one of the many house diplomats, and he sat at the table with his usual combination of agitated awkwardness and intense concentration, his left elbow resting on a small document portfolio. Both were normals, and had followed Hank out west with Inferno.